Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday December 21, 2012 @03:50PM
from the jig-is-up dept.

Dupple sends this news from Reuters:
"The European Commission charged Samsung Electronics on Friday with abusing its dominant position in seeking to bar rival Apple from using a patent deemed essential to mobile phone use. The Commission sent a 'statement of objections' to the South Korean group, with its preliminary view that Samsung was not acting fairly. 'Intellectual property rights are an important cornerstone of the single market. However, such rights should not be misused when they are essential to implement industry standards, which bring huge benefits to businesses and consumers alike,' Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in statement."

Samsung have plenty of design-space in which to play. The completely spherical phone is an untapped market, crying out for vendors. Apple have really done everyone a favour. All hail the the fruit! Pretty soon the whole barrel will be as sweet-smelling!

Apple sue nearly every manufacturer over generic shapes and actions, and the government just give a green light for dumb intellectual property to be registered.

Samsung sue Apple over actual inventions, and they get investigated.

This world is going to the shits.

(yes I know Samsung's patents were dubious because of being FRAND, and in an ideal world they shouldn't have used them. But in an ideal world they shouldn't have had to counter sue because Apple generic design patents).

I agree. This is what patents are for after all. Why only have shitty patents for things not important and punish people who've got the real stuff? Make sense? Remove them already.

FRAND actually sets the licensing rates as "reasonable"... it's the R in FRAND. Apple did not want to pay the already established and accepted reasonable rate and instead wanted a huge discount. Which is again the ND part of FRAND "Non-discriminatory", which states that the rates have to be non-discriminatory across all individuals.

Also, FRAND allows for early-bird adopters of a technology to get a reduced rate (to promote new technology adoption) . Apple was not an early bird adopter and was pretty much

Why does this stupid fandroid argument still get modded insightful on/.? Set aside the ignorance on the difference between design patents (which shouldn't really be patents in the first place, but have to be registered as patents because you can't copyright an industrial design for some reason) and FRAND patents. Apple did not generically patent all "rounded corners" as the fandroids claim. They patented which corners were rounded, and by how much. Compare the iPhone to the Nokia Lumia. Both are minimalist designs. Both have rounded corners. But the Lumia doesn't look anything like the iPhone, thus not infringing on the "rounded corners" design patent, while also clearly showing that having the exact same rounded corners as the iPhone is not a necessity for a smartphone.

This is pretty much the situation with most patents - the fandroids have no idea how to read one, much less what it applies to. That is why the outrage - it is easy to get upset about something you don't understand, but think you understand (ie. like the rounded corners, where not ALL rounded corners are infringing).

Same thing applies to software vs. hardware patents. There is no way to distinguish them, so you have to ban them all.

This is fundamentally a FRAND issue. Samsung submitted their patents as FRAND, Apple did not. FRAND places limitations on what Samsung can do with their patents in exchange for a simplified licensing system that gives them long term royalties from virtually every mobile device manufacturer.

Anyhow, going after Apple with FRAND patents was always a risky strategy, and the EU charges are exactly why.

Anyhow, going after Apple with FRAND patents was always a risky strategy, and the EU charges are exactly why.

Samsung used FRAND patents to counter obvious patents and failed. Clearly, the patent system is total bullshit. This is why we can't have nice things, right? If TPTB can't handle the responsibility of creating patent law that works, then perhaps we shouldn't have any at all.

The basic concept is essential vs non essential patents. Essential patents are supposed to be licenced out so as not to be used as a monopolization tool, where as stuff that isnt essential to compete , not so much.

Considering "rounded corners" wasnt even a patent, and its entirely possible to put out a phone with other shaped corners, then no this is not a legitimate comparison at all.

Now that is a blatant lie. Rounded corners are essential in engineering design of plastic appliances due to fabrication constraints, material efficiency and better wear and impact characteristics. Apple put in the bullshit patent specifically because ten of thousands of plastic appliances have rounded corners by virtue of design requirements, so the bullshit patent could purposefully be used to obstruct other manufacturer. A straight up psychopathic business scheme.

They're too busy licking their phones or queuing to buy a <Phone-they-just-bought-three-weeks-ago-for-two-and-a-half-times-the-actual-market-worth-which-was-already-behind-the-curve-when-they-bought-it>S

Personally, I don't think FRAND goes far enough, because it just leads to squabbling about what is "fair" and "reasonable". Obviously, the party who owns the patent and the party who wants to make a new standards compliant device will disagree as to how much is fair. From the perspective of the new entrant, the patent owner may have fleeced all previous licensees with regards to the "F" and the "R" in order to maintain a higher across-the-board licencing rate under the guise of "ND". Of course, from the per

I wouldn't go that far. It's good to encourage companies to contribute to standards so that we actually do get standards and not every company for itself. But I think it would be a good idea for open licensing terms to be part of any standards submission. So Samsung can suggest patented tech X as a standard, but that needs to come along with a statement that X will be licensed for 3 cents per device to anyone who wants to use it. The license should cover all reasonably foreseeable use cases, and any that come up later get decided by the standards body. Nothing would stop Samsung from also offering a different license agreement to anyone, but the standard one would always also be on the table.

Let me make it simple for you. Anything that hurts the bully is a good thing. The bully getting away with being bully is not. So basically when you see Apple being screwed you should rejoice. You are free to hate or like the others though. Hope this helps.

Let me make it even simpler. Anything that hurts a bully is a good thing, so whenever a company that makes over a few billion in revenue gets screwed, whether it's Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, etc. you should rejoice. You don't think any of them got to their dominant position by being nice guys, especially the Korean Chaebol and the privacy invading ad company, do you?

There's nothing wrong with making money. Personally, I think you should rejoice when a company, big or small, gets screwed over after being anti-competitive, or anti-consumer. Of course, I don't think people should give these companies money either.

Your hate is completely misplaced. Don't hate Apple (or anyone else) for enforcing their patents. Hate the patent system if you don't like it. Keep in mind that the patent system requires Apple to protect their patents or risk losing them.

You might disagree with the way the business world works--as I know many of the ignoramuses on slashdot do--but Apple is the only company in this whole new-age-of-computing fracas that has been playing by the rules.

Like not paying license fees for patents of other companies?Yeah, Apple is soooo innocent...

Apple are playing by rule from the Big Book of Business:* Rule 73b clause ii) Doubly-maximize profits by selling your shiny-yet-behind-the-curve-when-sold product to retards for 2.5 actual market worth whilst simultaneously obtaining the hardware at such low costs that the supplier *literally* enslaves its 'workers' to meet demand to the extent that they are jumping to their deaths to escape.